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The biggest restaurant opening of 2026 was always going to be Noma L.A., even if it isn’t properly a restaurant at all. It’s a pop-up, albeit a substantial one—a four-month residency by the pioneering Copenhagen restaurant, taking over the Paramour Estate, a California-Gothic manor in Silver Lake, and transforming it into a home for inventive, cerebral, exploratory meals at fifteen hundred dollars a head. When tickets went on sale, in January, the entire run sold out in minutes. Nearly everything Noma does is news; the restaurant’s influence—and that of its head chef, co-owner, and public face, René Redzepi—sends ripples through the culinary world like a rogue moon. This past weekend, on the eve of the L.A. residency, the news was ugly. On Saturday, March 7th, the Times reporter Julia Moskin published a heavily sourced article chronicling a sustained culture of physical and emotional abuse at Noma between 2009 and 2017, most of it at Redzepi’s hands. Moskin describes reports of the chef punching, pinching, and jabbing cooks, verbally assaulting them, slamming them against walls, and subjecting them to humiliating public punishments for seemingly trivial transgressions, such as adjusting the volume of the dining-room sound system, or leaving a tweezer mark on the petal of an edible flower.

Aspects of the conduct outlined in Moskin’s article are old news. In 2015 Redzepi published an essay in the food magazine Lucky Peach in which he admitted to having been “a bully” and “a terrible boss,” and addressed a specific incident in which he viciously berated a young cook. He also professed a newfound commitment to modelling a less volatile, less aggressive kitchen environment. But the new revelations of physical violence make Redzepi’s prior gestures toward amends-making feel like a lie. The stories of abuse have newly come to light thanks largely to Noma’s former head of fermentation, the chef Jason Ignacio White, who last month began posting to Instagram about harrowing acts he had witnessed at the restaurant; this prompted other Noma alumni to reach out to White with their own testimonials, many of which appear to be corroborated by Moskin’s reporting. (A spokesperson for Noma told The New Yorker that the institution has made “meaningful changes to transform our culture” and that it is conducting an “independent audit” to insure that it keeps its “workplace safe.”) In the days since the Times article was published, several corporate sponsors of Noma’s L.A. residency pulled their support. On Wednesday, the residency’s first day of service was picketed by protesters organized by White in conjunction with the hospitality-labor organization One Fair Wage. The same day, Redzepi announced, via social media, that he would “step away.”

What comes out of Noma’s kitchens and laboratories is, to my mind, the closest thing the gastronomic world has to art. So much of ultra-high-end dining is constrained by the need to rationalize itself to diners; a restaurant that charges hundreds (or, increasingly, thousands) of dollars is only persuasively “worth it” if it bombards customers with material justifications for its price tag—luxury ingredients, opulent tableware, militantly choreographed platings and service. Noma, by contrast, is more in tune with the standards applied elsewhere in the arts: the worth of what it sells arises from ingenuity and point of view. I’ve eaten there twice—in 2016, at its original location, in a centuries-old maritime warehouse in Copenhagen’s inner harbor, and again, in 2019, at Noma 2.0, a purpose-built restaurant and culinary campus a few neighborhoods over. Both meals were defined by Noma’s signature devotion to “sense of place”—a culinary cliché now, but only because Noma made it one. The restaurant’s philosophy, built on hyperlocal ingredients, many of them unexpected or bizarre, all prepared in ways that were strikingly evocative of climate and season and terrain, provided an emotive counterpoint to the sterile molecular-gastronomy movement that it drew upon and eclipsed. During my more recent visit, several of the courses were built around a variety of cultivated molds; nearly none of them was delicious (mold, for the most part, tastes like nothing), but I left the meal feeling enlivened by the sheer scope of Noma’s creativity, and somewhat intellectually stunned.

People love to scoff at this sort of high-concept culinary stuff. What’s served at Noma is “food” in the way that couture is clothing–a basic human need spun so far beyond the minimums of physical exigency that it’s almost nonsensical to hold it to similar standards. Did lunch at Noma taste good? Is a shredded, inside-out, three-sleeved garment by Rei Kawakubo a “shirt”? The questions are, to a point, irrelevant; you’re either disposed to accept the potential artistic merits of this type of formal play, or you’re baffled by, and maybe a little contemptuous of, those monied suckers who willingly shell out for it. In January, not long after seats for Noma L.A. went on sale, I was a guest on the KCRW radio program “Press Play,” discussing the rabid reaction to the ticket drop. Asked about the eye-watering cost of the meal, I defended it: people spent that amount or more to go to a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé show, which is just as ephemeral as a tasting-menu dinner. Well-heeled patrons of the opera or the ballet will pay oodles of money for the same sort of see-and-be-seen social jockeying that will certainly be taking place at the Paramour Estate.

Another thing about consuming art is that it is, in essence, a matter of choice. The torn-up shirt, the color-washed canvas, the orchestra stilling its bows for four minutes and thirty-three seconds of room tone, the butterfly-shaped cracker covered in a downy layer of white mold: art is a consensus, an agreement of value between creator and consumer. I don’t think the work of Noma is empty now that Redzepi, the embodiment of its cachet, is being held accountable for a fuller range of abuses; on the contrary, I think the goals that the restaurant pursues, and that its vast and largely anonymous corps of workers achieve—novelty, technique, narrative, surprise—are, in many ways, the only things that matter in restaurants, once the bare physical fact of hunger has been satiated. But as we learn over and over again—and, if we forget, we are forced to relearn—no art exists without the circumstances of its creation. Noma’s influence is essential to the story of the violations that took place there. A stint at Noma is the highlight of any cook’s résumé, the culinary equivalent to singing at the Met or dancing with the Bolshoi or interning at The Paris Review. It’s easy to understand why thousands of people clamored to work there, and why, once a lucky few made it in, they might have found it difficult to complain, or to criticize, or to leave. The institution weaponized its own status. To reject the significance of Noma as an institution now is, in a way, to unfairly shift a portion of blame onto the very people who were hurt—people who were there only because they, too, believed in its value. They weren’t wrong to want to be in that kitchen; what was wrong was the way their adulation and ambition were rewarded with terror and abuse.

It sometimes feels like the restaurant world is in a perpetual state of reckoning, a ceaseless cycle in which prominent chefs are exposed for their misdeeds, then express contrition and promise big adjustments and more humane workplaces. On Saturday, the same day that Moskin’s Times report was published, both Noma and Redzepi posted statements to their social-media accounts addressing the allegations. Redzepi apologized, saying, “To those who have suffered under my leadership, my bad judgment, or my anger, I am deeply sorry and I have worked to change.” Reading the flood of comments that piled up underneath the posts, I was horrified to see how many expressed solidarity with the chef rather than with his victims. Some of the messages of support seemed motivated by a sense of friendship, or at least celebrity-class solidarity. Big-name chefs such as Michael Solomonov and Hajime Yoneda left strings of heart emojis; Pierre Thiam wrote that he admired Redzepi’s humility. More unnerving, though, were similar comments from cooks and fans who haven’t achieved the same levels of fame and success. They applauded Redzepi’s courage. They praised his resilience. They outright asked for jobs at Noma. Some—too many—dismissed Redzepi’s thirty-odd accusers entirely, seemingly out of a belief that enduring violence is just what kitchen life entails, and that those who want to make it as chefs need to suck it up. But not even Redzepi appears interested in that exonerative line of thinking anymore. “When I first started cooking, I worked in kitchens where shouting, humiliation, and fear were simply part of the culture,” he wrote in his statement. As Noma grew, he continued, “I found myself becoming the kind of chef I had once promised myself I would never be.”

A new book from Redzepi and his team, “The Noma Guide to Building Flavour,” is scheduled for release in April, presumably timed to capitalize on interest in the Los Angeles residency. Earlier this week, I received an advance copy from the publisher—almost certainly put in the mail before the Times story dropped—along with a handwritten note from a publicist inviting me to spend time with Redzepi when he’s in New York, next month, for the launch. “I love that you can really hear his voice,” the publicist wrote in her note to me, of the new book. “The curiosity, the passion, and focus on moving forward.” The book and the L.A. pop-up come during what was already a transitional period for Noma. Its Copenhagen dining room ostensibly closed forever earlier this year, and Redzepi has been talking for a while about the launch of Noma 3.0, a hazily articulated new concept set to launch in 2027. His statement about “stepping away” was posted to Instagram with a video of him addressing the gathered staff in L.A. It’s worth noting, though, that he doesn’t appear to actually be leaving his role as the head of Noma, or divesting from the brand. You punch an intern in the stomach. You crouch behind a counter so that the dining room can’t see, and stab a line cook in the leg with a barbecue fork. Time passes; time continues to pass. “This is your restaurant now, each and every one of you,” Redzepi tells his staff. “For me, I’m going into planning the next phase, O.K.?” ♦

On a Sunday morning in February, about a thousand people filled the high-ceilinged sanctuary at Mercy Culture, a nondenominational evangelical megachurch in Fort Worth, Texas. The senior lead pastor, Landon Schott, gave a sermon that was mostly about the virtues of generosity, although he occasionally veered into political territory. “I do not believe with any part of me that the vaccine was the mark of the beast, but it sure was conditioning for it,” he said, at one point. Then the worship band kicked in, and the young, diverse congregation lifted up their hands.

A few hours later, the church hosted a more explicitly ideological gathering put on by For Liberty & Justice, the church’s political arm. The organization was founded in 2021 to promote candidates who may not attend the church but who are committed to a shared vision of religiously infused far-right politics; it has since helped usher more than a hundred candidates into office. Nate Schatzline, the founder of For Liberty & Justice, is a living embodiment of the nonprofit’s goal of Christianizing government: he has served both as a pastor at Mercy Culture and as one of the most conservative members of the Texas legislature.

That evening, a crowd had gathered to hear from a handful of people running for office, including Ken Paxton, a U.S. Senate hopeful and the current Texas attorney general. Volunteers served coffee and soft supermarket cookies while a man running for agriculture commissioner handed out packets of wildflower seeds and flyers promising to “combat Chinese AgroTerrorism.” A bald man who hoped to win a seat in the state legislature pitched me in quick succession on his hemp business, his cryptocurrency, and his ministry. Schatzline, a stubbled, sleepy-eyed man in his early thirties, gave an opening prayer. “God, tonight is not just about taking ground in government. Tonight is about taking ground for your kingdom,” he said to a room of bowed heads. “God, I pray right now that you are sending a wave of your spirit throughout our country, and that, God, it doesn’t matter how bad polls look. Father, you are going to bring awakening and spiritual revival to America this year.”

Mercy Culture church in Fort Worth, Texas.

People not attuned to the evangelical world may have missed the growing prominence of hyper-politicized churches such as Mercy Culture, which have become a key wing of the MAGA coalition. Compared with the religious right of previous generations, this cohort of pastors, influencers, and self-described prophets offers up a version of worship that’s at once more mystical, with an emphasis on supernatural powers, and more militaristic, with heightened political rhetoric. Many adopt a Christian-nationalist framework, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed as such.

The Johnson Amendment, a long-standing provision in the U.S. tax code, prohibits nonprofits, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Houses of worship aligned with both political parties have long flirted with defying the rule, but, after Trump was first elected, that defiance became more overt. Mercy Culture’s pastors hung a candidate’s banner behind the pulpit, endorsed politicians during Sunday services, said that people who vote for Democrats weren’t truly Christian, and described Kamala Harris as a demonic Jezebel taking the form of a snake encircling the White House. “Big whoop,” Schott said, responding to an investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune that questioned whether his statements from the pulpit might undermine the church’s tax-exempt status. After the 2016 election, Trump told leaders at the National Prayer Breakfast that he would “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment; last July, the I.R.S. announced that it was weakening the enforcement criteria. (Joshua Moore, the chapter coördinator at For Liberty & Justice, told me that, though the organization has to his knowledge only ever supported Republicans, it is nonpartisan: “If you find me a Democrat that shares our values, we’ll happily put them on our list.”) The move was interpreted by many, including Schatzline, as permission for churches to endorse candidates to their congregations. “What’s your excuse now?” he said on his podcast. “Why will you not get loud now?”

The undermining of the Johnson Amendment was a boon for Mercy Culture. For Liberty & Justice announced plans to expand to a dozen states, partnering with like-minded churches. But the mood at the event that February evening was notably sombre. The previous day, North Texas had been rocked by an upset in a special election for a state Senate seat. In a solidly red district, an underfunded Democrat defeated the Republican candidate, a Mercy Culture ally, by nearly fifteen points. That marked a more than thirty-point swing from 2024, when Trump won the district handily. Although the election was largely symbolic—the Texas legislature is currently not in session, and the candidates will run again in November—it was widely seen as evidence that voters were repudiating the current Republican agenda. (Last week, James Talarico, a state legislator who rose to prominence with his public criticism of Texas’s Christian-nationalist faction, won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Paxton did worse than expected, and will face a runoff election against Senator John Cornyn in May.)

Even before the primary election, the alarm was palpable in North Texas, arguably the heart of the state’s Christian-nationalist movement. “Last night, we got our butts kicked,” Tim O’Hare, a judge in Tarrant County, told the room at Mercy Culture, speaking about the February special election. “We got whipped.” If Tarrant County “falls into Democrat hands” in November, he went on, “what do you think will happen to all of North Texas? Five years before the whole thing is blue? And if North Texas in five years, ten years, is bright blue, how does Texas stay red?”

As Schott relates the story, God told him that, before he opened his own church, he needed to consult with a Dallas megachurch pastor named Robert Morris. That consultation turned into a yearlong internship at Morris’s Gateway Church, which has one of the largest congregations in the country. Schott came to think of himself as Morris’s “spiritual son.” In 2019, he founded Mercy Culture with his wife, Heather. Following in the footsteps of social-media-savvy churches such as Hillsong, in Los Angeles, Mercy Culture had a worship band that played earnest, anthemic rock, and its pastors wore skinny jeans. The church’s minimalist bumper stickers, reading “✝ = MERCY,” became so ubiquitous around the Dallas-Fort Worth area that parody stickers began to circulate: “NO MERCY”; “MERCY = CULT.”

Last year, Morris pleaded guilty to five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a child, and Schott’s pastoral lineage became something of a liability. But Schott—who visited Morris in prison in February and said that God has forgiven him—tends to lean into controversy. Last year, he posted a video of himself at a school-board meeting for M.C. Prep, a private school affiliated with the church, beaming at the camera as balloons bobbed behind him. “I just found out we are the No. 1 school in Texas for least vaccinations!” he enthused, holding up a custom-made T-shirt proclaiming the dubious honor. (The school reportedly has a fourteen-per-cent vaccination rate.)

In January, 2025, Schott led a worship service at the Texas state capitol, and he arrived sporting a look that would not be out of place at South by Southwest: flat-brimmed fedora, long silver chain. In a meeting room, he paced the stage, spitting out incantations meant to protect lawmakers from malignant spiritual forces. Men in suits placed their hands on the walls to bless the building. The scene alarmed Matthew D. Taylor, a religious-studies scholar and the author of “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.” Taylor grew up evangelical and got a master’s from Fuller Theological Seminary, at the time one of the country’s most prominent evangelical seminaries. Since Trump’s rise, Taylor had been tracking what he has called a “tectonic shift in the culture of American evangelicalism,” a move toward more militant, authoritarian, and politicized expressions of faith. Schott’s ceremony struck him as an escalation, not so much for what was said—the language of spiritual warfare, though perhaps startling to outsiders, was nothing new—but rather for the position from which he said it. The self-identified spiritual warriors were no longer relegated to the fringe but invited into the inner sanctum of government.

When Trump first announced his Presidential run, evangelical élites, like other institutionalists, were slow to embrace the crude, multiply divorced New Yorker who struggled to name his favorite Bible verse. Much of Trump’s initial support came from the nondenominational charismatic world. (Charismatic Christianity is centered on worshippers’ direct, personal encounters with the Holy Spirit, and maintains that the prophetic revelations and demonic attacks of the Church’s early era are still active forces today.) These churches, which largely existed outside established hierarchies, were quicker to tap into their congregants’ interest in Trump. Many key figures were associated with a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which aims to establish Christian dominion over American society and government.

In the decade since, Trump’s early admirers have been elevated alongside him, and right-wing politics have acquired a charismatic flavor. Trump rallies and worship services increasingly resemble each other, with shared aesthetics, language, issues, and celebrities. The influence is apparent even among non-evangelicals. Tucker Carlson, who is Episcopalian—traditionally among the most buttoned-up of Protestant sects—claimed in 2024 that he was “physically mauled” by a demon while asleep in bed next to his wife and four dogs. Trump used to treat his charismatic acolytes with a kind of affectionate bemusement; since the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, he has increasingly adopted their prophetic framing, claiming that he was “saved by God to make America great again.” According to one study, forty per cent of evangelical Christians who did not believe in prophecies thought that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; among prophecy-believing evangelicals, the figure was more than eighty per cent.

Mercy Culture’s pastors have come to play an increasingly prominent role in the MAGA universe. “I don’t think anybody’s star has risen higher in the last few years than Landon and Heather Schott,” Taylor said. Last year, Schatzline decided not to run for reëlection, instead taking a leadership role on the National Faith Advisory Board, Trump’s de-facto religious Cabinet; Landon Schott also serves in the N.F.A.B.’s leadership. Mercy Culture recently purchased a building in Washington, D.C., across from the Supreme Court, where it hosts Bible-study groups made up of congressional staffers. “Kingdom leaders are using that house on kingdom business,” Schott said in his sermon in February. “Massive, massive movements are happening because we are hosting the presence of God and hosting leaders in that house.”

Taylor believes that the spread of what he calls MAGA Christianity is serving as cover for the authoritarian turn in right-wing politics: if your enemies are controlled by demonic forces, why would you respect how they voted? “When you think back to the nineteen-eighties and the rise of the religious right, the James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell moment, they were naming their organizations things like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. I’m not a fan of those guys—I think many of them were scoundrels—but they were still assuming the rules of liberal democracy as the frame,” he said. Much like the earlier religious right, For Liberty & Justice hopes to “invade and reform” the Republican Party, Schatzline has said. But rather than claiming a popular mandate its authority comes from prophetic revelation.

Carlos Turcios, the Tarrant County director of For Liberty & Justice, was born in 2001 and grew up in Fort Worth, in a politically divided household. In high school, he was entranced by Bernie Sanders, though he soon switched his allegiance to Trump, whom he saw as the most authentically anti-establishment candidate. Along the way, he came to believe that Christian values should be more thoroughly reflected in the country’s laws. These days, Turcios’s politics encompass economic populism, America First nationalism, and religious authoritarianism. This constellation of beliefs can sometimes put Turcios at odds with older conservatives. “Forty, fifty years ago, we probably would have been called liberal for supporting big government,” he told me. “But, you know, it’s a different time.” On the phone, Turcios and I had a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation about housing affordability, war, and the perils of smartphone distraction. At the For Liberty & Justice event, I was startled—but probably should not have been—when he gave an apocalyptic speech invoking blood, enemies, evil, Satan, and urgent spiritual warfare.

Christian nationalism is arguably the dominant political force in Texas today, thanks, in part, to multimillion-dollar donations from two West Texas billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. It has become routine to hear Republican leaders proclaim that the principle of separation of church and state is not aligned with the Founding Fathers’ true wishes. In the past few years, Texas has mandated posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms, approved an optional “Bible-infused” curriculum for public elementary schools, and forced school boards to vote on instituting a daily prayer program. The Christian-nationalist wing of the state’s Republican Party has pushed the legislature’s recent crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. rights and its passage of a multibillion-dollar school-voucher program, the largest of its kind. (The voucher program was widely considered a boon to Christian schools; so far, no Islamic schools have been approved for funding.) For Liberty & Justice’s chapter coördinator, Joshua Moore, told me that, though some people consider “Christian nationalist” to be a derogatory term, it’s an accurate descriptor of the organization’s philosophy. I asked him whether non-Christians should hold positions of power in the U.S. “As a general rule, I would say no,” he said.

Carlos Turcios, the Tarrant County director of For Liberty & Justice, outside the Light of the World Church after hosting an event in Fort Worth, Texas.

The Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, Mercy Culture’s back yard, have been a key incubator for this combative version of Christianity. It is where the school-board wars of the early twenty-twenties kicked off, and where an architect of the state’s abortion ban was primaried for not being conservative enough. But it’s possible to discern signs of a backlash. In 2022, school-board candidates supported by a far-right Christian PAC won every race they entered. Last year, the conservative school boards in Tarrant County and elsewhere suffered significant losses. “I just never dreamed that every single one of those school-board incumbents would not be reëlected,” a former school-board member told the Fort Worth Report. “It’s the first time I can remember that happening.”

The February special-election results were a further blow. Leigh Wambsganss, the Republican candidate and a Mercy Culture ally, had become a minor MAGA celebrity, owing to her role in facilitating a far-right takeover of the area’s school boards. At a Turning Point USA women’s conference in 2022, she strode out onstage wearing a pink sheath dress. “My name is Leigh Wambsganss,” she said, “and my pronouns are Bible believer, Jesus lover, gun carrier, and mama bear.” But the aggressive mode of politics practiced by Wambsganss and her cohort eventually alienated many of their fellow-conservatives. A former office-holder and conservative Republican told me, sighing, that the MAGA Christians were “fiscal dummies.” (It’s also likely that local issues played a role: Wambsganss was a proponent of a controversial move to divide a school district.) According to the Republican pollster and strategist Ross Hunt, Wambsganss’s loss, which was a blowout, was due less to mobilized Democrats than to independent and Republican voters turning against her. In his analysis, between a quarter and a third of Republicans voted for the Democratic candidate, Taylor Rehmet.

When I asked the young men of For Liberty & Justice whether the results implied that voters were growing tired of their brand of politics, they said no. “Conservative candidates simply need to run on a Christian conservative populist message,” Turcios told me. Moore rejected the idea of moderation, even if it meant losing elections. “We’re not compromising our principles. We’re not compromising our values. We’re certainly not going to compromise the Word of God,” he said. “Scripture tells us that the blessings rain down on the just and the unjust. And I say that to say, when Christians lead, when Christians are involved in leadership positions, especially in politics, everybody benefits.” ♦

Attendees take part in a worship service at the Light of the World Church in Fort Worth, Texas, in March, 2026.

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Han Ong reads his story “My Balenciaga,” from the March 23, 2026, issue of the magazine. Ong is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of more than a dozen plays and two novels, “The Disinherited” and “Fixer Chao,” which will be reissued in July.

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For those in Donald Trump’s orbit, great power often comes with great dispensability. Take Kristi Noem, who, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, was in charge of the President’s top domestic priority of carrying out mass deportations, until she wasn’t. She became the first Cabinet secretary to be fired in Trump’s second term earlier this month, when he announced that he would replace her with Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator and a former mixed-martial-arts fighter. Noem, who’d been willing to do virtually anything in the role to boost her standing, was a product of the White House agenda, never a shaper of it. Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and there’s little reason to think that Noem’s ouster will change Miller’s approach. It may even serve to embolden it, by giving him fresh cover. The department has temporarily paused large-scale arrest operations in the wake of a national outcry over abuses in Minnesota, and it is in the midst of a partial shutdown owing to opposition from congressional Democrats. The Administration’s bigger ambitions show no signs of flagging, however. In fact, they are leading toward a new humanitarian and legal crisis.

D.H.S. is now detaining some seventy thousand people in jails across the country, more than at any other point since the department was founded, in 2002. Twenty-three immigrants have already died in custody in the current fiscal year, putting it on pace to surpass the previous one, which had the highest number of deaths in immigration detention in decades. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Administration has opened new facilities, repurposed others closed by previous Administrations, and converted temporary holding cells at federal buildings in cities such as Los Angeles and New York into spaces for longer-term detention.

Overcrowding, abuse, and neglect have made conditions far worse, and basic agency oversight has been gutted. The government has also detained at least four thousand children, sending many of them to a notoriously grim facility in South Texas called Dilley. A legal settlement in place since the late nineteen-nineties is supposed to bar the government from keeping minors in immigration custody for more than twenty days, but ICE has routinely flouted that rule. “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” a fourteen-year-old girl from Honduras, who has lived in New York for seven years, told ProPublica; by then, she’d been in custody for forty-five days while waiting to be deported.

The largest detention site in the country, holding three thousand people, is a tent camp called East Montana, on a military base in El Paso. It was put up in less than two months, but started housing people two weeks after construction began. “Dust comes in through holes in the vents,” a detainee said in a sworn declaration to the A.C.L.U. A confidential ICE report, obtained by the Washington Post, showed more than sixty code violations in fifty days, including inadequate medical care and an absence of phones, which made it impossible for detainees, eighty per cent of whom have no criminal records, to speak with lawyers or family members. Three people died at the facility in a six-week period this winter, including a fifty-five-year-old Cuban man named Geraldo Lunas Campos, who the government claimed had been “in distress.” (After an El Paso County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, ICE tried to expedite the deportation of witnesses who had observed an altercation between Lunas Campos and a group of guards.) There have been outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles at the site, and ICE officers have used the dangerously subpar conditions to pressure detainees to sign papers authorizing their deportation.

Last summer, the Republican-controlled Congress gave D.H.S. forty-five billion dollars to build more jails. The appropriation, which came as part of the President’s domestic-spending bill, has kept ICE flush with cash during the shutdown. The Administration has used the money, in part, to begin to create a network of bigger facilities, investing thirty-eight billion dollars to buy up large warehouses across the country and retrofit them. One of them, near Camp East Montana, in a small city called Socorro, is expected to hold eighty-five hundred people. So is another, in Social Circle, Georgia, which, according to the Times, would be “larger than any single jail or prison building in America.”

A major reason that so many immigrants are being locked up is a government policy to deny them bond. Last July, the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, issued a memo in which he claimed, in a radical and dubious reinterpretation of a twenty-nine-year-old statute, that the agency can automatically detain people who are in the country unlawfully and keep them in detention while they fight their cases. Ordinarily, unless a detained person had very recently entered the U.S., he could post bond if an immigration judge found that he didn’t pose a threat to public safety or represent a flight risk. This was the policy during the previous five Administrations, including during Trump’s first term.

But early last year Trump shrank the size of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the top appellate body overseeing the immigration courts, which are run out of the Department of Justice. Two months after the Lyons memo, the board issued a ruling instructing immigration judges to deny bond to anyone in detention with a legal case pending who had at some point entered the U.S. without inspection. The result has been a flood of habeas-corpus petitions filed in federal courts—more than fifteen thousand in the past two months alone. Most of the people submitting these requests have no criminal record, and many have lived in the U.S. for decades.

The question of whether the Administration’s bond policy is lawful will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court, but in the meantime hundreds of federal judges have taken issue with it. Frequently, they have given explicit orders for the government to release people from custody. The Administration has responded by attacking those judges—some of whom were appointed by Republicans—as “activist” and “rogue” jurists. At this point, the federal government is regularly ignoring or slow-walking judges’ orders.

In January, D.H.S. launched an arrest campaign in West Virginia, called Operation Country Roads, which was largely eclipsed by the situation in Minnesota. Drivers were targeted on state roadways, then held for extended periods without criminal charges. A federal judge wrote late last month that armed agents in unmarked cars who did not have warrants were “seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them.” He added that the practice was “deliberate” in its “elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force.” Such warnings should be impossible to ignore. ♦

You mentioned that your story “My Balenciaga” was triggered by two words in Mavis Gallant’s story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” which were quoted in a review of her collected stories. Can you elaborate?

I came upon the two words “the Balenciaga,” in a New York Review of Books essay on “The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant.” The reviewer, Gabriele Annan, put them in quotation marks, and then proceeded to quote the sentences that followed the initial mention of a Balenciaga dress in a Gallant story, in which, once again, “the Balenciaga” was invoked. In the story, the dress is a reminder of a more exciting time in the lives of the married protagonists, who have returned to Canada after having traipsed around the globe for years.

I’d read “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” a couple of times before, and it had never sparked my writing brain. But witnessing it secondhand, as it were, and especially seeing the two words isolated that way in the review, I immediately thought two things. One: Why is the story not entirely about the Balenciaga? Two: If I want a whole story about a Balenciaga, I’m going to have to write it myself.

Funny how one’s brain works. Reading Gallant’s stories, and the stories of Alice Munro, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and V. S. Pritchett—to name a few of my favorite short-story writers—is an occasion for me of mute happiness. I have nothing to contribute but my admiration. Journalism, however, is a different ball of wax. It seems fair game for my writing; news articles have been a source of inspiration for some of my other stories.

When I told you about the roundabout journey from “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” to “My Balenciaga,” you initially used the words “inspired by,” and I pushed back: “If I’ve taken two words from an original story, and not really even from the story but from a review of the story—does that still qualify as being inspired by said story? Is there a more apt word than ‘inspired’? Maybe the route of inspiration is postmodernist—a Xerox of a scrap of a Xerox, as it were—although there is nothing postmodernist about the resulting story itself.”

It’s equally important to me to point out that I wouldn’t have ventured very far with “My Balenciaga” if I didn’t have a deep fund of fashion knowledge to draw on. That comes from my love of the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, which made me seek out books and films on her and on fashion. Those gave me the belief that I could pull off a story set in a milieu of models and designers and a researcher tracing a dress’s provenance.

The story revolves around a dress that may be a Balenciaga, of course. But, more important, it revolves around a mother and a daughter and their relationship. The mother is a Filipina former model, who moved to New York—partly to escape the judgment of her parents in Manila—and raised her daughter (with the help of her sister) as a single woman. What drew you to this scenario?

I suppose you could say that this is a kind of “royalty-in-exile” story—a genre I have great interest in. In this instance, the “royalty” is the mother. She has been “exiled” from the glamorous precincts of her beauty and youth, and currently lives with her retinue: a sympathetic elder sister and a daughter whom she treats as a co-conspirator in her fantasies and fabrications. Instead of desultoriness—a common atmosphere in these sorts of stories—the prevailing mood is one of qualified happiness.

Here is a lesson I’ve taken from V. S. Pritchett, the master of qualified happiness (not that I could have told you, until recently, that I was “taking” anything from him, except pleasure in his words): Contra the writing-workshop wisdom, you don’t need conflict in a story. Maybe a “wrinkle,” a few minor complications, but no more. All you really need for a satisfying short story is a zestful spirit and nimbleness of language. And how much more zestful can you get than a character who puts on a Balenciaga dress to sit at her writing desk? That image would be right at home in a Pritchett story!

The mother was stunningly beautiful. The daughter, Lucy, refers to herself as ugly—and is called “beautiful” only after she gets a haircut and then wears the Balenciaga, which seems to make others see her differently. How does the physical disparity between Lucy and her mother affect their relationship?

If I wanted to take a photograph that would be emblematic of the relationship between the mother and daughter, I’d pose Lucy on a lower eye line than her mother. She’s gazing up, with a shy half smile, at her mother’s face, which is turned, per her model’s training, directly to the camera, challenging and coquettish, and with a nearly convincing pose of invulnerability.

Lucy has no interest in her father, even once she knows who he is. Why do you think that is?

Maybe Lucy understands that to make contact with her father is to breach her relationship with the person she loves most in the world? Maybe she understands, but doesn’t want to live with, the answer to this question: surely, her mother must have needed some financial help and must have told Lucy’s father of Lucy’s existence, so why hasn’t he made contact?

The death of Nora Aunor—a Filipina singer and movie star—sets the narrative in motion. Why does she play that role here? And was she an important figure in your own life, too?

I’ve said that what started “My Balenciaga” were those two words in The New York Review of Books. Equally important for me, with this story, is that I wanted to pay tribute to Nora Aunor, a lodestar of my youth, whose recent death made me reflect on the idea of inheritances, as well as shifting notions of beauty.

In the story, the mother and daughter remember Nora primarily as an avatar of their “vanished youths.” And, of course, Nora’s career of starring in weepies ties into the mother’s ritualistic crying at the opera, among other occasions.

The story begins with Nora’s death, in April of 2025, and continues through to the present moment, late winter, 2026. I began writing it almost on the heels of the New York Times running her obituary in May. It was July when I started. It would perhaps have been more logical to tell a story that runs parallel to the time of its composition (and appears in the magazine as soon as its story line ends) in the present tense. But as soon as Nora died, and as soon as I had decided that I was going to write a story that included her, there was no question but that I would use the past tense because the past tense so clearly evoked, for me, the lost world in which Nora belonged. She was my first experience of rabid fandom, but I read her obituary with a certain detachment; also with sadness, as much for Nora (dead at seventy-one!) as for me, that young boy in Manila who looked up to her, and also the adult who hadn’t thought of her in a long while.

The mention of Anna Magnani in the story helps set Nora’s stardom in context: both were terrific actresses with great histrionic gifts; both were much loved in their native countries; both had looks that were said to be typical of the features of their countrywomen, rather than hewing to a homogenized standard of “Hollywood beauty,” though I feel that Nora’s was a true beauty, and Anna’s came more from her being a force of nature, an indomitable spirit.

Also, of course, germane to this story is the fact that Lucy has both legacies: a Filipina mother and an Italian father.

“My Balenciaga” leaves a big question unanswered, because Lucy chooses not to know the answer. Why do you think, by the end of the story, she no longer wants to learn the truth?

All I’ll say is: Lucy has the truth. She has her truth. And it’s not an empty truth, because it seems to be corroborated by many good hunches—for example, the feeling that she is “being held in place by a firm hand,” when she puts on the titular dress to accompany her mother for a walk in Central Park. Also, it’s important to add that, although by the time the story ends Lucy has decided not to look up the answer she sought, that doesn’t mean she never will. Maybe the length of time she is taking is the time she needs to acclimate to possible disappointment.

You published a story in The New Yorker a little more than a year ago, “Ming,” which circles around a similar question of the authenticity and value of a creative work—in that case, an antique Chinese ceramic cup. Do you have a particular interest in that theme?

I’m interested—and have been for a long time—in the idea of fakes. My first novel, “Fixer Chao,” for instance, was about a fake feng-shui master. (Hilarity ensues.) So authentication is an outgrowth of that original interest. Also, and probably most important, I recognize that objects have spirits. That we invest objects with spirits, and the process of authentication is a kind of divination. And that is very interesting to me. ♦